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Announcing TBR Ebooks!

Starting with a new publication concerning the background behind the 9/11 attacks, TBR News will be presenting a series of interesting, informative and definitive works for our readers. Future titles will include the complete Voice of the White House with much more added material that was considered too controversial to post, the heavily-censored Armenian Holocaust of 1916, the Bush-Lay private correspondence, the Assassination of JFK,Pearl Harbor intrigues and rare documents, Malaparte’s inside study of the making of revolution, sensational selected articles from the German Rudolf historical revision files, unpublished before Rudolf’s arrest and forced deportation to Germany, World War II studies of holocaust history, taken from secret German files and much more. Please see the title page for more information.

The Editors

Descending Into Darkness: The Harring Report

A well-researched study into the background of the 9/11 attack: Who knew what and when did they know it. Russian and German intelligence material, not published before show that the U.S. had ample warning...and did nothing about it.

THE VOICE OF THE WHITE HOUSE

The full collection of the twice-weekly commentary of what is really going on inside the corrupt Bush White House. The spectrum includes the Gannon scandal, the planned invasion of Iran, many stories of stupidity and corruption coupled with biting sarcasm. Interesting to note that many, if not most, of the predictions have come true.

REGICIDE The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy

A landmark book that sold very well in hardback, this work contains actual intelligence documents concerning the inside U.S. plans to kill Kennedy; the reasons, the methods and the results.

The Final Reckoning: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature

By Harold Kreig, Lt.Col, AUS ret.

This is the first rational, heavily documented work on the subject of the Holocaust. Colonel Krieg has taken thousands of documents, including the official SS concentration camp records from 1935 through 1945 and official U.S. government postwar analysis of the system and the casualties and causes of death and produced a book that is highly informative and readable.  Heavily footnoted and annotated, ‘The Final Reckoning’ is logical and compelling and is an historical work that should be read through by any student of the period and subject.

Coup D’Etat: The Technique Of Revolution

By Curzio Malaparte

First published in Italy by Curzio Malaparte in 1928, this is a seminal work on historical seizures of power from Napoleon through Hitler.

Gestapo-Chief: The CIA & Heinrich Müller by Gregory Douglas

                In 1948, the former head of Hitelr’s Gestapo was interviewed by senior officials of the CIA in Switzerland where Müller had been in hiding since the end of the Second World War. His interview, for Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA’s Gehlen Organization, runs to nearly a thousand pages and for years was hidden in the CIA’s files.

                This is a translation of a part of the interview, which was initially conducted in German and then translated into English for CIA use.

                It is a fascinating series of historical episodes covering both the Axis and Allied sides with comments on Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Winston Churchill, the 20^th of July bomb plot against Hitler, Bishop von Galen’s heroic, and successful, attacks on the Nazis and their euthanasia program, the concentration camps, the Duke of Windsor, the Roger Casement diaries and many more fascinating and insightful views of a man who ran the most effective counter-intelligence agency in modern times. 

                There is also extensive information on the attempts on the part of the CIA to silence or discredit the fact that the Gestapo Chief worked for the United States and eventually came to live in Washington, D.C. as part of the notorious “Operation Paperclip.”

                Fascinating inside views of many top Nazis and CIA officials. 

The CIA COvenant: Nazis in Washington

by Gregory Douglas

* From the end of World War II, the American CIA imported thousands of Nazis into the United States to work for them, many on the list of wanted war criminals

*One of the most important of these was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler's Gestapo. Mueller was recruited by Colonel James Critchfield who ran the CIA's "Gehnel Organization' in Munich.

* Mueller kept journals and this book is a translation of three years (1948-1951) of notes and observations made of top CIA officials, President Truman, top U.S. government officials, plans for murder, thefts, kidnappings, wholesale thefts of public money and a terrifying pattern of uncontrolled ambition, unchecked by any person or agency.

* Also included are CIA and other agency's activities that have never been revealed.

*Mueller's deals in stolen Nazi art for the CIA are covered in detail.

*Also to be found are the steps the frightened CIA have taken to prevent the publication, sales or distribution of this work.

An Essay on the Principle of Population

by Thomas Malthus

The 1798 classic study of how supplies of food do not keep up with an expanding population

Malthus' theory is that population growth is geometric while the food supply increase is arithmetic.

A very literate and current study that clearly highlights present and current population problems

With the world's population higher than ever before, this is a work of great and current interest

CONSPIRACIES for Fun and Profit

Contents
The Evil Catholics Murdered Abraham Lincoln
TWA Flight 800: The Gathering of the Nuts
The Real Truth About the Kennedy Assassination!
The Great 9-11 Plot
Who is Sorcha Faal?
The Bush Indictments
Faked Conspiracy photos
The Sinking of the MV Estonia
The German Guy and the Destruction of Houston
The Great Contrail Conspiracy
Planet X
Remote Viewing unveiled

Notice!

Our new security system prevents email messages coming through the AOL server from being delivered to our address. This is because of the probability of unwelcome and problematical attachments to messages from this source, coupled with the fact that AOL’s voluntary cooperation with various American, and foreign, law enforcement groups makes contact with them in any form a risky business.  Correspondents wishing to contact TBR News are suggested to use another server. Ed.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people, On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H.L. Mencken

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

“Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance.”
-Eric Hoffer The True Believer

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

America’s Enemies!

There are four entities who represent the most dangerous enemies to American liberties since George III.

They are:

1.                    The Neocons or Likudists who owe their personal allegiance to another country and now completely control our foreign policy. They lied and deceived us into the Iraq war and are demanding that more and more American soldiers die to preserve their own country and ideals.

2.                    The Christian Evangelical right who is trying to force the United States into becoming a theocracy under their rule. They know in their hearts that they alone can restructure a secular humanist America into their idea of Heaven on Earth.

3.                    An element of American society that call themselves Patriots and are obsessively militaristic and great admirers of the corporate or fascistic state. Many of these have been very minor members of the American military and as a counterbalance to their reserve or rear area tours of duty, are rabidly in favor of draconian military action, the bloodier the better. Usually these drumbeaters are too old, or too fat, to fight and have no sons of draft age.

4.                    George W. Bush, who is the worst president in the history of the United States and directly responsible for the huge death tolls in Iraq, is determined to rule the United States until God puts a stop to him and is even more determined to force the American people into becoming obedient, Christian and self-sacrificing lemmings who worship at his shrine and march in step.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., August 5, 2007: “It is dawning on a befuddled Bush that he is in danger of losing everything.  His own Republicans, once so obedient, are leaving him in significant numbers and while the Democrats are not yet able to trounce him on legislative matters, it is only a matter of time before they will get enough Republican votes to freeze Bush in his tracks and end the filthy war in Iraq.

Bush has stated hereabouts that he will never, never pull out of Iraq, no matter what anyone else says or does. And he means it. This is not stubbornness or strong character but insanity.

The talk here in some areas is that Bush is frantically trying to find someone to stage a “terrorist attack” somewhere on American soil so he can regain his lost popularity that he got after the 9/11 attack. Those who claim the Bush people and the CIA or Mossad caused this are partially wrong. What everyone but the public knows is that Bush, the CIA, Cheney, the DCI, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld all knew almost to the day that Muslim extremists were going to hijack commercial aircraft and use them against “icons of American wealth and power” in both Washington and New York.

Their crime isn’t planning the attacks but in deliberately doing nothing to prevent them. Every one of the dead in the attacks can have their deaths laid squarely on the shoulders of the characters listed above.

And after this, Bush had unqualified support of the public and managed to put through rules and regulations that vastly increased his powers as President and greatly diminished the powers of Congress.

Now, it appears that he is losing an Imperial Presidency so he, a man of limited intelligence but with great powers of concentration, has decided to relive the glory days following 9/11.

The only problem is that if someone involved in the plot ever talked, the public, now outraged with Bush, would flare up in civil disobedience. This is the reason why his pet toadies are warning against “imminent al Quaeda attacks inside the United States.” Could Bush find people to help him out? Of course he could.

Hoover certainly found people to get rid of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King but since those days, the public has become far better educated on matters of crude manipulations and if, as they have mentioned, someone set off a shaped charge bomb on San Francisco’s landmark Golden Gate Bridge and destroyed it, very few sane people would believe it.

Bush would demand an immediate universal draft, troops would be flown back to the States from Iraq, detention camps would be reopened, the internet would be shut down immediately and such wonderful ideas as National ID Cards would be dusted off and implemented.

Nixon, cornered, knew when to quit but Bush never will and a crisis of monumental proportions is quickly building.

Is there an antidote to this madness? It is generally felt that if the public made its views very strongly known to their legislators with the warning that if this is not stopped at once, they will all be driven away from the public hog trough next year. This worked recently on the flawed Bush immigration bill and, please note, his toadies are trying to sneak parts of through Congress even as I speak.

If nothing else, common sense will tell you that Bush’s plans are not the ravings of a crazy blogger but there is a large gap between wanting something to happen and making it happen.  There are specific plans to invade Iran but they are still only papers in a Pentagon safe. Cheney may be demanding a fake “terrorist attack” and the obedient Bush may well agree with him but they do not have the power to simply do this and turn this country into a nazi-like state with themselves as perpetual rulers.  We have lost the oil and gas war to Vladimir Putin (who is twice or three time the leader than Bush ever could be), the Army is effectively ruined as a rapid response force, the dollar is slumping overseas, the stock market is slowly collapsing because of the mortgage, hedge funds and private equity swindles and Bush will do nothing. He has said, in public, that it is the states, not the Federal government, who must be responsible for the infrastructure, in effect blaming the state of Minnesota for the recent bridge collapse.

The immediate impeachment of both Bush and the rabid Cheney is the only effective solution to growing and dangerous problems that threaten all of us. It’s up to Congress to do this but they have let down the American voters again and again.

The only reason why most Congressmen can stand up without a spine is because their skin is so thick.”

A Dawning Dictatorship? - 911-2B & NSPD 51

August 5, 2007

by Captain Eric H. May

Military Correspondent

A Piecemeal Prologue

Half of the American people believe that the Bush administration is on the hunt for Al-Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks.

Another half believe that 9/11 was a Bush administration inside job, attributable not to Al-Qaeda, but to "Al-CIA-duh."

Both halves, though, agree on one thing, and aren't shy about saying it: This summer we are likely to suffer another terror attack, a "911-2B." The list of notables' quotables begins with the springtime warning of the vice president toNBC's Tim Russert on Meet the Press: April 15, 2007, Dick Cheney:

"The greatest threat now is 'a 9/11' occurring ... with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities."

June 3, 2007, Dennis Milligan, Chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party: "I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like  we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]."

July 1, 2007,  ABC News: "A secret U.S. law enforcement report, prepared for the Department of Homeland Security, warns that al Qaeda is planning a terror "spectacular" this summer."

July 11, 2007, Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security chief: "I believe we are entering a period

this summer of increased risk."

July 20, 2007, Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury:

"Whether authentic or orchestrated, an attack will activate Bush's new executive orders [NSPD-51], which create a dictatorial police state in event of  national emergency."

July 24, 2007, Peter DeFazio, House Homeland Security Committee member:

"I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack. Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

A Recess Review

As Congress goes home for August, opinion polls show that roughly two out of three American citizens  either dislike or detest George W. Bush, and things  are rapidly falling apart for him. More and more White House officials are invoking executive privilege to avoid answering the hard questions of an exasperated legislative branch about them and their "unitary executive."

Alberto Gonzales is the object of a growing congressional impeachment movement, as is Dick Cheney -- and half of the public wants Bush impeached, too. In the last two weeks the stock market has droppedby nearly a thousand points, and threatens a bearish mauling of the financial sector that has been the Bush administration's base and beneficiary. His own Republicans are threatening to bail out on busted-down Iraq, unless they get strongreassurances from General David Petraeusin mid-September.

The general's situation is hardly reassuring, though. Embattled Baghdad, which he was sent to secure, is currently under fire and without water, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is publicly calling for his removal. Wednesday, August 1, could have beenthe worst day of all for the White House.

In the morning came the news that the Iraqi government had fallen apart, with the Sunni faction quitting al-Maliki's cabinet.

This disastrous development was likely to hold the headlines until the end of the week, when Congress would head home to discuss this latest war calamity with already war-weary constituents.

A Minnesota Miracle

Wednesday afternoon could have added even more woes to the White House. America's first and only Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, appeared on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer to discuss

some scorching anti-Bush comments he had made on July 8 to constituents in Minneapolis, in which

he had compared 9/11 to the Reichstag Fire, and George Bush to Adolph Hitler. In 1933 Hitler used the Reichstag Fire, carried out under his orders, to establish a dictatorship in Germany. Ellison's analysis is accepted by most of the Muslim world, much of the non-Muslim world, and a growing minority of Americans.

Rather than defend it, though, Ellison backed down with apologies in his interview with Blitzer, saying that his remarks were a "rookie mistake," never to be repeated. Perhaps Ellison's retreat from his remarks was an attempt to stave off the disaster that frequently befalls those who disrupt the political paradigm.

If so, it didn't work.

Two hours after Ellison's mea culpa, his congressional district suffered a freak disaster with the collapse of the I-35 bridge into the Mississippi River. One man's loss is another's gain, though.

In the news, the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge supplanted the collapse of the al-Maliki government and the Bush White House for the rest of Wednesday..., then Thursday..., then Friday.

By Saturday the congressman who had accused the unitary executive of treason was with Bush himself, taking a tour of his afflicted district, and begging for the relief of federal funds.

A Cowardly Congress

It's hard to fathom why the Democratic Congress would bow down to the unitary executive before skipping town for summer vacation, but that's just what they have done.

Last week Congress gave the White House the gift of expanded executive power by its approval of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, further extending the reach of the unitary executive. Friday, the Senate voted 60-28 in favor of granting Bush and Gonzales more power to conduct domestic surveillance without the trouble of a court warrant.

The House followed suit Saturday, with a vote of227-183.

A Dodging DeFazio

On the same day that the Minneapolis bridge fell into the Mississippi, the White House refused a written request by House Homeland Security chairman Bernie Thompson and Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio to read classified annexes of NSPD-51, the presidential order, announced in May, by which Bush can declare himself dictator in the event of a natural catastrophe like Katrina -- or a terror attack like 9/11-2B.

DeFazio's Oregon is the target of "Noble Resolve," an upcoming 9/11-2B military exercise scheduled for August 20-24 that includes a nuclear attack on Portland. Pacific Northwesterners are increasingly alarmed that they may be the targets of a false flag nuclear attack, or the fallout from it.

You can't blame them. After all, according to all sources, left and right, 911-2B is the only thing that can revitalize the war president and the war plan. Oregon's DeFazio is unfazed by it all, or pretends to be.

Penny Dodge, his chief of staff, refuses to answer questions from media about his failure. DeFazio has taken to the Internet and airwaves to urge his constituents to relax -- despite his inability to examine NSPD-51, and his unwillingness to examine the possibility that they may be targets for a military exercise.

He urges trust in the motives of the unitary executive.

In doing so DeFazio fails in his duty, and acts the part of Bush's buffoon in a comedy of terrors.

_____

Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine.

Bush signs controversial surveillance bill

August 6, 2007

Mark Tran and agencies

Guardian Unlimited

US intelligence agencies will no longer need a warrant to eavesdrop on US citizens' international phone calls and emails after George Bush signed a temporary surveillance bill yesterday.

The law, which was approved by the Senate and the House of Representatives just before Congress adjourned for the summer, had been made a priority by Mr Bush and his chief intelligence officials.

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," the US president said.

The measure gives the National Security Agency - which is responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications - and other agencies broader authority to monitor phone conversations, emails and other private communications that are part of a foreign intelligence investigation.

Congress approved the bill with surprising speed amid warnings from the Bush administration of a new gap in US terrorism defences and criticism from opponents who called it an erosion of the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.

Civil liberties groups and many Democrats have said the measures go too far and possibly enable the government to wiretap US residents communicating with overseas parties without adequate oversight from courts or Congress.

The new law, which updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, will expire in six months unless Congress renews it. Mr Bush is pressing for deeper and more permanent changes.

Previously, the US government had needed search warrants - approved by a special intelligence court - to eavesdrop on communications between individuals inside the US and people overseas if the surveillance was conducted inside the US.

Under the new legislation, the government can now eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants.

The change has come partly in response to the 2005 revelation of a programme monitoring, without a warrant, of conversations between foreigners and individuals in the US believed to have connections to al-Qaida.

House Democrats voiced severe reservations about the law. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, said it "does violence to the constitution of the United States".

However, with the Senate already in recess, Democrats faced the choice of allowing the bill to be approved mainly by Republicans or letting it die.

Enough members of the party, afraid of being accused of being weak in the "war on terror", backed the measures. In a 227-183 vote, 41 joined all but two Republicans, while 181 Democrats opposed the bill.

Democrats say they plan to return to the matter when Congress returns from its summer recess to address what Ms Pelosi called the "many deficiencies" of the legislation.

Because the law expires in six months, Congress will have to revisit the issue by the end of the year, in the middle of the presidential primary season.

Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death

August 5, 2007

by Frank Rich

New York Times

Gerald Ford  spoke the truth when he called Watergate “our long national nightmare,” but even a nightmare can have its interludes of rib-splitting farce.

None were zanier than the antics of Baruch Korff, a small-town New England rabbi who became a full-time Richard Nixon sycophant as the walls closed in. Korff was ubiquitous in the press and on television, where he would lambaste Democrats and the media “lynch mob” for vilifying “the greatest president of the century.” Despite Nixon’s reflexive anti-Semitism, he returned the favor by granting the rabbi audiences and an interview that allowed the embattled president to soliloquize about how his own faith and serenity reinforced his conviction “deep inside” that everything he did was right.

Clearly we’ve reached our own Korffian moment in our latest long national nightmare. The Nixon interviewed by the rabbi sounded uncannily like the resolute leader chronicled by the conservative columnists and talk-show jocks President Bush has lately welcomed into his bunker. For his part, William Kristol even published a Korffian manifesto, “Why Bush Will Be a Winner,” in The Washington Post. It reassured us that the Bush presidency would “probably be a successful one” and that “we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome” in Iraq. A Bush flack let it be known that the president liked this piece so much that he recommended it to his White House staff.

Are you laughing yet? Maybe not. No one died in Watergate. This time around, the White House lying and cover-ups have been not just in the service of political thuggery but to gin up a gratuitous war without end.

There is another significant difference as well. Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.

The ranks of unreconstructed Iraq hawks are thinner than they used to be. Some politicians in both parties (John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Gordon Smith) and truculent pundits (Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan) who cheered on the war recanted (sooner in some cases than others), learned from their errors and moved on. One particularly eloquent mea culpa can be found in today’s New York Times Magazine, where the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that those who “truly showed good judgment on Iraq” might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing “wishes for reality.”

But those who remain dug in are having none of that. Some of them are busily lashing out Korff-style. Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars’ critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.

It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, “A War We Just Might Win,” by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued “at least into 2008.”

The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, “No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference” in Iraq if there’s no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as “analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of “Mission Accomplished.”

You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald’s Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway “experts” now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn’t do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.

At least the more rabid and Korff-like of the war’s last defenders have the intellectual honesty not to deny what they’ve been saying all along. But their invective has gone over the top, with even mild recent critics of the war like John Warner and Richard Lugar being branded defeatist “pre- 9/11 Republicans” by Mr. Kristol.

It’s also the tic of Mr. Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard (and its Murdoch sibling The New York Post), to claim that the war’s critics hate the troops. When The New Republic ran a less-than-jingoistic essay by a pseudonymous American soldier in Iraq, The Weekly Standard even accused it of fabrication - only to have its bluff called when the author’s identity was revealed and his controversial anecdotes were verified by other sources.

A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on “Meet the Press” last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views “into the mouths of soldiers.” As Mr. Webb noted, the last New York Times-CBS News poll on the subject found that most members of the military and their immediate families have turned against the war, like other Americans.

As is becoming clearer than ever in this Korffian endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war’s sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war’s champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war’s opponents.

Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of “Nightline” was branded unpatriotic by the right’s vigilantes.

The same playbook was followed by the war’s champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his “near insubordination.” When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.

One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops’ lives are.

“I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life,” Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. “I’ve been handed the check.” The amount, he said, was “roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning.”

Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week’s sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don’t know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman’s cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.

But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army’s most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what “supporting the troops” means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.

Dying in vain or for George W's daddy?

August 7, 2007

by Julian Delasantellis

Asia Times

The great 20th-century scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, once wrote of what he called "plastic hours", moments in history so filled with promise and possibilities that all manner of great change for the human race was achievable.

There was one such moment, a chance to make a real start toward a conclusion to the United States' four-year agony in Iraq, a true plastic hour, at the Democratic Party's recent "YouTube debate". The moment was not seized on; in fact, it seems more as if the Democratic Party tossed its plastic hour straight into the recycling bin, to sit there as refuse along with the old newspapers and empty beer cans.

The Cable News Network (CNN), attempting to be the very model of a modern major cable news outfit, structured the event so as to have the questions submitted by the real heartland of America or, at least, the part of the real heartland of America that knew how to attach webcams to their computers and then upload the attendant video files to YouTube.

Prior to the actual event, it seemed as though nothing could top the entertainment value of the videos not selected to be posed to the candidates. Among the best of these were a man asking a question about the future US policy in Iraq while wearing a bad-guy wrestler's mask; another man had his parakeet on his shoulder asking another question while standing on some rotating device that produced the effect of the room seeming to spin around him. My favorite was a sophisticated woman in an elegant red evening gown, sitting in an ornate room behind a lovely Queen Anne desk, singing in alto an operatic aria decrying telephone outsourcing.

The most important question of the evening (more so than the questioner with apparent severe eye damage who asked whether Senator Barack Obama was really black or whether Senator Hillary Clinton was really a woman) came from John Cantees, from the state of West Virginia.

"My question is for Mike Gravel [US senator from Alaska from 1969-81, now seeking the Democratic nomination as the darkest horse in the field]. In one of the previous debates you said something along the lines of the entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. How do you expect to win in a country where probably a pretty large chunk of the people voting disagree with that statement and might very well be offended by it? I'd like to know if you plan to defend that statement, or if you're just going to flip-flop. Thanks."

The young man asked the question in an angry tone; I could not tell if he was angry at Gravel for making the statement about US troops dying in vain, or angry at him for a possible upcoming backtracking on the statement, or, as I remember my own son's teenage years, just angry so as to be angry. I think it's the last, especially after seeing this young man's YouTube homepage. It lists among his favorite video posters "diebunnyhater" and "vomitinyourface"; besides the video selected for the debate, there is also one showing him kicking in a window, and another called "my online dating video", where he justifies his statement that "I am a rapist" by noting that "they chose to not run away as fast as I was chasing them".

The aphorism vox populi, vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) is attributed to the 8th-century poet Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus; the prospect of this gentleman and his young vox populi possessing vox dei is enough to turn anyone to atheism.

At first, Gravel tried to answer the young man's question directly. "Our soldiers died in Vietnam in vain." Then, in keeping with the quixotic nature of his campaign, he justified the above statement with this curious manner: "You can now, John, go to Hanoi and get a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream cone. That's what you can do. And now we have most-favored-nation trade. What did all these people die for? What are they dying for right now in Iraq every single day? Let me tell you: there's only one thing worse than a soldier dying in vain; it's more soldiers dying in vain."

Was the senator trying to say that it would have been all right for the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to have done so if only you could now get a Burger King Whopper in Hanoi instead of a hot-fudge sundae?

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards, former North Carolina senator and the Democratic Party's 2004 nominee for vice president, knew how to answer this question; with their fatter campaign war chests, they can probably afford better focus-group polling than the shoestring Gravel campaign.

Obama: "I never think that troops, like those who are coming out of The Citadel [the South Carolina military college that hosted the debate], who do their mission for their country are dying in vain."

Edwards: "I don't think any of our troops die in vain when they go and do the duty that's been given to them by the commander-in-chief. No, I don't think they died in vain."

And in their responses, the prospect of a significant withdrawal of US forces from Iraq before 2009 grew ever fainter.

For many of those residing outside the United States, the continued US willingness to sustain the levels of casualties and expense it continues to suffer in Iraq is bewildering to the point of exasperation. All the previously stated justifications for the war - Saddam Hussein's threats, weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy in the Middle East, "we'll stand down when they [the Iraqi military and security forces] stand up", the "temporary" "surge" - have proved to be, at the very best, unintentional falsehoods; at worst, they've been proved to be bald-face lies.

Still, the war continues to have enough support that just under half of the US Congress continues to block all efforts to end it through a legislative initiative. A growing number of congressional representatives from the president's Republican Party now say they support a change in policy or a troop withdrawal, but when it comes to voting on measures that would place these declared desires into law, they prove themselves to be examples of the new political acronym called WINO - they're for Withdrawal In Name Only.

In the June 6 edition of Asia Times Online, my article Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time explained how, although it is perfectly clear that the current war is actually being fought in geographical Iraq, for many Americans, and perhaps for the American psyche as a whole, what actually is happening in Iraq is nothing but the last battle of the Vietnam War, as the US fights on for a victory in Iraq that would expunge the memory of its lone military defeat in Vietnam.

"Remember the Maine" (the US battleship that exploded in questionable circumstances in Havana harbor in 1898) became the patriotic slogan that rallied US public support for the Spanish-American War. "Make the World Safe for Democracy" did the same for World War I, "Remember Pearl Harbor" likewise for domestic US support of World War II. "Support the Troops" became a near-omnipresent popular-culture rallying cry as US troops embarked to Afghanistan to battle the Taliban after September 11, 2001, and even more so as the "war on terror" shifted west to Iraq in 2003.

Anyone schooled in symbiotic analysis can see the contrast between today's war slogan and those that came before; whereas the previous ones exhorted the country to support the war, and so by extension the troops, for an external reason, the purpose of this war seems to be the troops themselves. Like a clever Zen koan, the logic here continuously chases its own tail; the exhortation is to support the troops so as to support the troops.

How this catchphrase came to dominate public discussion will provide a rich research trove for future PhD candidates in political science, going through old newspapers and electronic-media archives to find its actual first use. Suffice for now to say that in the 1980s, a national feeling of guilt settled over the US centered on the veterans of the Vietnam War.

For conservatives, this sentiment was interpreted to mean that the Vietnam soldiers were not "supported" in their efforts to win the war. The war could have been won, should have been won, in actuality was being won, but then the treasonous activities of home-front anti-war protesters denied them the victory just within their grasp. Then, according to the apologue that spread across red-state conservative America like a brush fire, on their return home, these brave, proud warriors, disembarking from military transport aircraft in their dress uniforms, were nearly universally spat upon by the unkempt, disheveled, fetid and feculent hordes that represented the US anti-war movement.

Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book The Spitting Image, says this cultural archetype is a myth, that he could find no reliable documentation that these perfidious expectorations ever actually occurred. What we would now call the conservative blogosphere rose to contest these charges, but not even they could come up with any authenticated photographs or film images of these alleged events actually occurring.

But the feeling that the Vietnam-era troops had been given a raw deal was not limited to the political right. In both the center and the left there was the feeling that more could have been done for the returning troops. Medical care for them by the US Veterans Administration was said to be substandard to the point of being non-existent; initially, the medical condition now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder was frequently dismissed by doctors as just indolence or cowardice.

The economic dislocations of the mid-1970s, particularly the hollowing out of the industrial sector after the 1973 oil shock, meant that jobs were scarce for the returning vets, making their reintegration into the civil economy and society ever more challenging; those who failed to do so frequently descended into life-long struggles with alcoholism, drug abuse and homelessness. Perhaps most biting was the feeling expressed by many returned veterans that the culture they had returned to was uncomfortable with their presence among them; a common staple of television police or medical shows of the period was the show's protagonists dealing with the "crazed" Vietnam veteran, in need of medical attention to deal with his psychoses, or police action to deal with his crimes.

So across the US political system, a consensus developed in the 1980s that the country had treated its Vietnam troops and veterans poorly. Next time it would be different: we would, even if we opposed the war, "support the troops".

That's easier said than done. At no time in the current Iraq war have Americans been asked to do any real sacrifice of income or lifestyle, as happened at the home front during World War II. Indeed, it seemed that all you needed to prove your patriotism and devotion to the cause of freedom was to sport an under-$5 made-in-China "support the troops" car ribbon magnet on the bumper of your gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle; many commentators noted the cognitive dissonance of displaying your commitment to the defeat of Islamic radicalism while driving a vehicle whose continued fueling acts as a transfer-of-wealth process from ultra-patriotic middle America to Mideast nations funding the terrorism that the supported troops are sent to counter.

Still, the phrase "support the troops" continues to resonate powerfully across America's heartland; in a land that respects and cherishes all manner of religious diversity (as long, of course, as it's Christian), "support the troops" has taken on the role of a sort of contemporaneous ecumenical catechism.

Google currently returns 1,360,000 hits on the phrase "support the troops", everything from official Pentagon and White House support sites to hundreds of sites that give instructions to home-front America on how to send the troops candy and toiletries. In contrast, the attempt to popularize the anti-war catchphrase "Support the Troops - Bring Them Home Alive", has failed miserably; it only returns a measly 364 hits.

In and of itself, the "support the troops" canon is rather innocuous. Like any endlessly repeated liturgical incantation, it begins to lose its power the more times it's mindlessly repeated. The problem has come with the defenders of the new faith expanding the liturgy's areas of application and interpretation to enlarge its, and their, influence.

Maybe e pluribus unum (out of many, one) is the country's semi-official motto; perhaps a better choice for modern-day America would be "nothing succeeds like excess".

If one person says he supports the troops, you just know that a second person is going to come along and say she supports the troops even more, a third will say that the first pair's support of the troops ranks them as mere "support the troops" pikers compared with him.

It's not enough to support the troops anymore; you now must support every aspect of the troops now, their actions, their sentiments and, especially, their mission. Like the purported slivers of the True Cross, the troops now seem to ennoble and sanctify everything associated with them, especially the war itself. Out in Middle America, the war's supporters in and out of the Republican Party have found this to be a highly effective way to deflect the vaguely formed amorphous anti-war sentiment the public reports to the public-opinion pollsters; really to support the troops, you must support their war.

The July 30 edition of The Weekly Standard had an article by William Kristol, one of the neo-conservative ideologues who started advocating for war with Iraq well before September 11, 2001, that shows how this ploy works.

The anti-war left hated what the troops were doing, fighting the enemy in Iraq, and they hated the troops' goal, victory in Iraq. So "supporting the troops" meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to - something anti-war politicians and media did with great hand-wringing and hoopla. With the ongoing progress of the "surge", and the obvious fact that the vast majority of the troops want to fight and win the war, the "support the troops but oppose what they're doing" position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?

Like an old-time rocker playing tried and true favorites so as not to disappoint a baby-boomer concert crowd, Kristol also goes on to play one of the hard right's original golden oldies, that during the Cold War, the US left, for all its proclamations of patriotism, was really rooting for Josef Stalin.

Just as a monkey in an experiment learns that pressing a bar in his cage will get him a treat, and pressing it more will get him more, the war's supporters are waling away at the support-the- troops bar furiously. On July 15, on the NBC (National Broadcasting Co) News program Meet the Press, a debate on the war was held between war supporter Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and a war opponent, newly elected Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia.

Graham was working the bar with abandon. "They [the troops] re-enlist in the highest numbers anywhere else in the military. They're speaking ... the soldiers are speaking, my friend. Let them win ... Let them win."

The fact that Graham had the gall to accuse Webb, a twice-decorated Vietnam veteran, Ronald Reagan-era secretary of the navy, and a man with a son currently serving as a marine officer in Iraq, of not supporting the troops demonstrates just how much power the support-the-troops canon currently has to temper and discipline the anti-war debate in the US. Whether true or not, Graham's argument that the war should be continued because the troops want to fight it reduces the war to something that sounds like a carnival attraction; let the children ride it as long as they want.

The fairly extensive media reporting of the abuses at the US military prison at Abu Ghraib was met by an avalanche of critical comment along the lines that such coverage was not supporting the troops. Editors at US mainstream print and electronic media outlets got back into line fast; reporting of subsequent military abuses of Iraqi civilians, such as the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya, and the subsequent cover-up murder of her family, along with reported premeditated killings of unarmed Iraqi civilian noncombatants at Haditha and Hamdaniya, received, at best, cursory, back-page coverage in the print media, and virtually no coverage on television.

There, the editors "spiked" these stories in favor of reportage on more important issues. Frequently, these included the current state of public drunkenness of America's proud young starlets.

It is difficult to determine just how much the US troops, many on their third or fourth tours in Iraq, who are fighting the war actually support the war. The defenders of the canon react with aghast at the apostasy that they might not; to them, today's soldiers and marines are the continuum of an unbroken line that reaches back to the Revolutionary War soldiers during the frigid winter at Valley Forge, all the way to the courageous marines braving withering Japanese fire to raise the flag at Iwo Jima.

Their dedication proves that they are both utterly devoted to the mission of delivering freedom to the Iraqis and that they must be supported. Since the troops know full well that the Bush Pentagon, much like the rest of the Bush government, punishes dissent far more harshly than it does incompetence, it is only natural that most dissenting voices are not publicly heard. Still, much as it would like to, the administration of President George W Bush has not managed to suppress all differing voices. New York Times polling data reveal that opposition to the war, at about 60% of the population depending on how the question is posed, is the same in military families as it is in the general population.

The troops' public voices may be silenced, but on many military veteran discussion groups (see my May 25 article A surge in the wrong direction on the varied sentiments expressed in these sites), the fathers of today's troops, reporting on what their children describe to them in letters home from the front lines in Iraq, are more than generous with outrage and indignation at what they see as their children's pointless sacrifice. Perhaps most fascinating are recent reports from the US Federal Election Commission. They indicate that it is the aggressively anti-war candidate Congressman Ron Paul, not Vietnam hero and war supporter Senator John McCain, nor front-runner Rudy Giuliani, who has garnered the most campaign contributions from US military personnel and veterans.

But the enforcement of the ideological orthodoxy assures that such information never strays far beyond the periphery of the information superglut; it certainly has not become an issue in the current political debate on the war.

Because it would imply that today's troops are, in volunteering to serve, either stupid (the canon's enforcers punished Senator John Kerry harshly during last year's campaign for implying that, leading him soon after to withdraw from consideration for the 2008 nomination) or misguided or both, the war's critics are severely constrained as to just how vigorously they can question the war's ever-changing rationalizations.

Since the current troops' sacrifice means you can't question the mission for which they are sacrificing, the previous deaths of more than 3,600 US troops must have had some purpose, if only for the reason that America's troops suffered them. Although most Americans would now be hard-pressed to identify specifically some current cause now being achieved in Iraq worthy enough to have sacrificed the fallen, and then to sacrifice more in the future, you can't follow that reasoning through to the next logical step, as Gravel did (sort of), but Obama and Edwards wouldn't, and say that their deaths are in vain.

In February, Obama was roundly criticized for violating the canon when he said, "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and to which we have now spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." That last line, about "young Americans wasted", raised a hornets' nest of controversy from the canon's defenders.

He quickly backtracked, and his response at the YouTube debate proves he knows what you can and cannot say about the war in contemporaneous America.

Polls say Americans want an expedited end to the war; the inability to accomplish this has resulted in the new Democratic Congress suffering a decline in approval poll numbers so quick and steep that they are currently even lower than Bush's, whose numbers settled into a crater never to be climbed out of after the ineffective federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But it is the acceptance and internalization of the bastardized tautology of the canon - if the troops are pure then so is their cause, and if their cause is noble it would be wrong to stop doing it - that has prevented any significant or effective anti-war movement from emerging in the US Congress or general population. As if they were continually ashamed and fearful of the exposure of their mad aunt in the attic, the Democrats know that it is their party's previous support of the Vietnam anti-war movement that the war's supporters are really trying to remind the public of when the charge is leveled that being opposed to the Iraq war means not supporting today's troops.

Today's middle-aged anti-war Democrats don't talk much about their past back then as young Vietnam-era protesters; in hiding and denying the past they once were, they have allowed their opponents to define them and, in doing so, deny them the present, probably their future as well.

Human-like creatures have been dying in combat since at least the Battle of the Monolith among the ape tribes in Arthur C Clarke's 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Willingly they have died for their ruler's greed, or megalomania, or lust, or for a hundred other reasons. It is the height of hubris to suggest that the inherent nobility of the American experiment, of the American cause, renders US troops impervious to the possibility of falling in vain.

Since all the stated rationales for the war have been proved false, I'll finish by entertaining you with mine. Gleaned from reading many of the books published about the Iraq war and Bush, but especially Bob Woodward's 2004 Plan of Attack and 2006 State of Denial, I see the war as representative of nothing but a fit of deep Oedipal rage, illustrating the terrible contradictions in the love/hate relationship between the current Bush and his father, former president George H W Bush. It was not at all uncommon for the mid-20th-century US patrician class to raise sons with a cold and distant parenting style, leaving the current President Bush filled with simultaneous unresolved towering admiration and seething resentment toward his father.

At first, he dealt with this problem with alcohol and substance abuse; now, as president, he tries to top his father, and in doing so quiet his inner demons, by doing what president George H W Bush could not, conquering Iraq. In doing so, he unconsciously hopes that, at last, his father might finally grant him the paternal love so long denied him.

If that's not a cause to die in vain for, I don't know what is.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.

Turkish troops cross Iraq border

August 5, 2007

FOCUS News Agency

Baghdad. The reported incursion by Turkish troops across the border into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish militants Wednesday threatened to raise the stakes in the region.

"It is not a major offensive and the number of troops is not in the tens of thousands," an unnamed Turkish official said. However, such ventures across the border only heightened tensions in Iraq, The Independent reported Thursday. U.S. military officials said they could not confirm the Turkish border crossing but were "very concerned" as Turkey has been threatening an attack into the Kurdish region of Iraq to try to reduce the presence of Turkish Kurd guerrillas associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, the British newspaper said. Last weekend, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates cautioned Turkey against a military intervention in Iraq. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul denied that a cross-border operation had taken place.

"There is no such thing, no entry to another country," Gul said. "If such a thing happens we would announce it." Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said there had been "no major operations" by Turkey though there had been a build-up of Turkish troops.

Green Zone Follies

Baghdad, 2 August 07: “ Herewith a partial copy of a Pentagon guide that was prepared on I June, 2007 and disseminated to all military commands in areas from which counter-insurgency American troops are now serving. No target date for the implementation of these actions has been given but unofficially it will be implemented “immediately following any significant outbreak of domestic resistance.” It is also a subject of conversation here that it is fully expected that a faked ‘terrorist attack’ will take place inside the United States while Congress is on vacation this summer.”

US Martial Law and Domestic Detention Camps

With the growing possibility of  civil insurrection or physical resistance to U.S. government policies, the official machinery is now in place for swift containment by U.S. military forces, to include the various State National Guards, Special Forces and Military Police units.

It is to be stressed that while these plans, which have been maturing since the Reagan Administration and are now fully functional, are at present considered only contingency plans. It s requires only a Presidential Order to activate them.

Under President Bush's "National Strategy For Homeland Security", FEMA will be placed under the Office of Homeland Security. Since 2001, both Homeland Security and the Department of Defense have been participating "in homeland security training that involves military and civilian emergency response",

Earlier, President Bush has ensured there will be no current FBI/FEMA conflict, mandating that FEMA work closely with the DOJ (of which the FBI is part), creating what Bush calls a "seamlessly integrated" network. With this bond between FEMA and the DOJ, the Administration effectively voided the inter-departmental checks which stopped FEMA's earlier activities.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA "will continue to change the emergency management culture from one that reacts to terrorism, to one that proactively helps communities and citizens avoid becoming victims". Paradoxically, FEMA's prior negative image problems was a direct outgrowth of its pursuit of proactive methods, its attempt to legitimize the assumption of extraordinary powers under the cloak of "counter terrorism".

When president Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua he issued a series of executive orders that provided the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with broad powers in the event of a "crisis" such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a US military invasion abroad". They were never used, but have since been rewritten to allow for “violent and widespread domestic opposition against a military invasion abroad.”

FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling US domestic unrest. From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defense preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra affair. They included executive orders providing for suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA

In April 2002, the Pentagon, acting on orders from the President  created a Northern Command to aid Homeland defense. At that time, it was stated that this command was designed to “assume a supporting role vis a vis local loyalist authorities. “

At the present time the full import of Reagan's national plan has been kept from the public. In order to keep his planning secret, President Bush took the step of sealing the Reagan presidential papers. Which contained these directives and operational guides.

The Director of Resource Management for the U.S. Army has reaffirmed on June 9, 2007, the official earlier memorandum relating to the establishment of a civilian inmate labor program under  rapid  current development by the Department of the Army. The document states, "Enclosed for your review and comment is the draft Army regulation on civilian inmate labor utilization" and the procedure to "establish civilian prison camps on installations."

Civilian internment camps or prison camps, more commonly known in the liberal press as ‘concentration camps’, have been the subject of much rumor and speculation during the past few years in America. Several publications have devoted space to the topic and many talk radio programs have dealt with the issue.

As of the present date, President  Bush and Homeland Security have authorized preliminary studies for the rapid construction of a National Detention Center Program-controlled series of detention centers, to be added to the existing 600 units now in place

The Department of Homeland Security has worked closely with an  Israeli company, Israeli Prison Systems, Ltd.  for the expedited construction of modular  internment camps, to be generally located in rural and relatively uninhabited areas throughout the Continental United States and Alaska. . Of these projected three hundred camps, one hundred and ten were authorized by the president and as of June 1, 2007, sixty-five camps have been built and, in addition to the 600 units previously completed are now ready for immediate occupancy. The U.S. military Corps of Engineers has been responsible for the construction of adjoining quarters for guard and administration personnel.

A Brief History of U.S. Civilian Internment Camps

The concept of mass internment camps was implemented during the decade of the 1930's when the idea was either integrated into national security planning or put to actual use in the world's three socialistic experiments - the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the United States under Roosevelt.

On March 9, 1933, Adolf Hitler put his Dachau detention center into operation where thousands of his own countrymen were sent. Stalin exterminated 7 to 10 million in his rural collectivization program from 1931-1933 and another 10 million in the purges of 1934-1939. It was this decade that the Soviet Gulag proved its worth. On August 24, 1939, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover met with FDR to develop a detention plan for the United States. Five months after this meeting, Hitler opened the Auschwitz detention center in Poland.

On August 3, 1948, J. Edgar Hoover met with Attorney General J. Howard McGrath to form a plan whereby President Truman could suspend constitutional liberties during a national emergency. The plan was code-named "Security Portfolio" and, when activated, it would authorize the FBI to summarily arrest up to 20,000 persons and place them in national security detention camps. Prisoners would not have the right to a court hearing or habeas corpus appeal. Meanwhile, "Security Portfolio" allowed the FBI to develop a watch list of those who would be detained, as well as detailed information on their physical appearance, family, place of work, etc

Two years later Congress approved the Internal Security Act of 1950 which contained a provision authorizing an emergency detention plan. Hoover  was unhappy with this law because it did not suspend the constitution and it guaranteed the right to a court hearing (habeas corpus). "For two years, while the FBI continued to secretly establish the detention camps and work out detailed seizure plans for thousands of individuals, Hoover kept badgering...[Attorney General McGrath for] official permission to ignore the 1950 law and carry on with the more ferocious 1948 program. On November 25, 1952, the attorney general...caved in to Hoover."

Congress repealed the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 more than twenty years later in 1971. Seemingly the threat of civilian internment in the United States was over, but not in reality. The Senate held hearings in December, 1975, revealing the ongoing internment plan which had never been terminated. The report, entitled, "Intelligence Activities, Senate Resolution 21", disclosed the covert agenda. In a series of documents, memos and testimony by government informants, the picture emerged of the designs by the federal government to monitor, infiltrate, arrest and incarcerate a potentially large segment of American society.

The Senate report also revealed the existence of the Master Search Warrant (MSW) and the Master Arrest Warrant (MAW) which are currently in force. The MAW document, authorized by the United States Attorney General, directs the head of the FBI to: "Arrest persons whom I deem dangerous to the public peace and safety. These persons are to be detained and confined until further order." The MSW also instructs the FBI Director to "search certain premises where it is believed that there may be found contraband, prohibited articles, or other materials in violation of the Proclamation of the President of the United States." It includes such items as firearms, short-wave radio receiving sets, cameras,

propaganda materials, printing presses, mimeograph machines, membership and financial records of organizations or groups that have been declared subversive, or may be hereafter declared subversive by the Attorney General."

Since the Senate hearings in 1975, the steady development of highly specialized surveillance capabilities, combined with the exploding computerized information technologies, have enabled a massive data base of personal information to be developed on millions of unsuspecting American citizens. It is all in place awaiting only a presidential declaration to be enforced by both military and civilian police.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Directive 58 which empowered Robert McFarlane and Oliver North to use the National Security Council to secretly retrofit FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to manage the country during a national crisis. The 1984 "REX exercises" simulated civil unrest culminating in a national emergency with a contingency plan for the imprisonment of 400,000 people. REX 84 was considered so important that special metal security doors were installed on the FEMA building's fifth floor, and even long-term officials of the Civil Defense Office were prohibited entry. The ostensible purpose of this exercise was to handle an influx of refugees created by a war in Central America, but a more realistic scenario was the detention of American citizens.

Under "REX" the President can declare a state of emergency, empowering the head of FEMA to take control of the internal infrastructure of the United States and suspend the constitution. The President can immediately invoke executive orders 11000 thru 11004 which would:

1-                   Draft all citizens into work forces under government supervision.

2- Empower the postmaster to register all men, women and children.

3-                   Seize all airports and private and commercial aircraft.

4-                   Seize all housing in areas deemed to be “in rebellion against lawful authority” and to establish the relocation by force of any inhabitant, or inhabitants, deemed to be in rebellion.

5-                   The rounding up and incarceration of all persons known to be in rebellion, based on both current and past lists kept and maintained by the FBI, the DHS and military authorities.

6-                   The complete shut -down of the domestic internet.

7-                   Establishment and supervision of officially approved and cooperative media outlets.